With applications ranging from diagnostic procedures to radiation therapy, the importance of high-performance medical imaging is immeasurable. As such, new advanced medical imaging technologies continue to be developed. Digital medical imaging represents the future of medical imaging. Digital imaging systems produce far more accurate and detailed images of an object than conventional film-based imaging systems, and also allow further enhancements of the images to be made once an object is scanned.
The flat panel digital radiographic imaging detectors available today typically have a maximum imaging size of about 40 cm×40 cm. Often times, an area of interest much larger than 40 cm×40 cm needs to be imaged. Therefore, several sub-images may need to be taken and pasted together to form a single, larger, final image of the desired area of interest. For example, if a 90 cm spinal image is desired, three separate sub-images need to be taken and combined into a single, larger, vertical, final image.
During the display processing to combine such sub-images, overlapping sub-images are registered and blended together. Currently, this blending comprises geometry-based blending, which utilizes the geometry of the acquired data only, not the acquired data itself. Geometry-based blending is less than ideal since it assumes that the overlapping images, once registered, both contain the same data and information. This is not always the case, such as for example, when collimator blades are present in one image, but not in another. There is no information contained in those pixels where the collimator blades appear in the image. In such cases, geometry-based blending will weigh pixels containing no information as if they actually contain information, which can cause artifacts of the collimator blades to appear in the final pasted image. Therefore, it would be desirable to have systems and methods that utilize statistically-based blending techniques instead, which utilize the actual acquired data from both images, not just the geometry thereof, to create high quality final images that are free of such artifacts.